Valuable legacy of Professor Endel Tulving was donated to the University of Tartu

The legacy of Endel Tulving, the world-renowned researcher of human memory and one of the best-known scientists of Estonian origin, arrived at the University of Tartu Library from Toronto. It includes works on neuroscience, his personal archive of research articles and materials, as well as items and awards related to his scientific achievements. Tulving’s legacy is one of the largest and most significant collections donated to the University of Tartu in recent decades.

According to Jaanika Anderson, Director of the Library, Professor Tulving wished for his books, archive and objects to be donated specifically to the University of Tartu. “This is indeed an exceptionally extensive and valuable collection: the written materials will remain in the library, and the objects will go to the University of Tartu Museum,” Anderson said. The library processes the materials and ensures they will be available to all researchers.

Professor of Experimental Psychology Jüri Allik said that part of Endel Tulving’s archive had already reached the library many years ago. In 1989, Allik visited Toronto at Tulving’s invitation, where, among other things, he helped pack and send psychology journals donated by Tulving and several other scholars to Tartu. “Thanks to Tulving’s donation, the University of Tartu Library holds the most important psychology journals from the end of World War II onwards. Among the newly arrived materials, the most valuable part for the library and researchers is the collection of books on psychology and particularly on memory. It includes all the important works on memory published over the past half-century,” Allik noted.

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Endel Tulving (1927–2023) was an Estonian-born experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who worked in Canada and conducted research on memory. Among his major discoveries, the most significant is the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. The former stores general knowledge of the surrounding world, while the latter primarily concerns the recollection of an individual’s personal life experiences.

Tulving’s articles and scientific work are highly regarded, as evidenced by more than 130,000 citations of his publications in Google Scholar, the world’s largest database of academic literature. His best-known work is Elements of Episodic Memory, published in 1983, which had a profound influence on the development of memory theory, neuropsychology and cognitive science. In 2009, Tulving was awarded the prestigious Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier Prize, which is given for the most influential achievements in biomedicine.